[Spoilers] A more civilized age - Arendel of the Ljosalfar (Uberfish)

[uberfish]

I'm planning to switch alignments around to get different religious units, possibly including AV ones, and yeah if I happen take over blighted land I'll at least have the option to clean it up.

As far as I know the only really quick way to raise the AC is to mass produce units out of a city with Prophecy of Ragnarok. You can always launch a crusade against whoever's responsible to put a stop to it I suppose.

[SevenSpirits]

Have fun!

[uberfish]

Thanks Sevenspirits for doing the map!

I'll withhold judgement on the start until I actually get the save and can explore a bit, surely there must be a better location to settle nearby as I can't think of much that I actually like about what I see in the screenshot

[uberfish]

Double post, somehow.

[uberfish]

Let's start with what I do like, that's quite simple: Floodplains.

What I don't like:

- 4 tile lake + mountains taking up capital space for a civ that likes to grow large cities, lakes are actually worse than useless if you aren't Lanun because they're a defensive liability if someone goes Octopus Overlords (see also: Lanun world spell)
- 2 resources, but both are quite weak:
- off-river wheat (an Agro floodplain is better at 5/0/1 vs 5/0/0)
- off-river wine (any calendar resource is better as that tech also unlocks Agro) which if I settle on the plains hill I can't even use.

It does have a lot of river tiles so a Financial civ would probably be be able to make good use of it overall... but rivers aren't that important for me because forest improvements don't get that +1 commerce bonus from the river.

With Quick speed/No starting settler moving around too much is rather expensive. It's quite likely that there is a better place to settle nearby that keeps a floodplain access, gives up the wine and gains something actually useful, but choosing which direction to scout is a bit of a gamble. It seems that there are floodplains to the NW but the lake gets in the way of efficient scouting; my left scout can't reveal much in turn 1, putting most of the burden on the right scout, who will probably move NW-NE and see if there's anything promising near the 2nd plains hill. I can also choose to sacrifice a turn with my settler to move 2E and scout from that hill with the plains hill 1E of his starting location as a fallback. This may very well be worth it if I spot a calendar resource or similar.

BTW I really like the FFH starting settler bonus because it takes away a lot of the luck element of scouting in these situations. In FFH you stay on one city for longer than in vanilla civ4 so the choice of where to settle your first city is very important, but obviously you don't really want people inadvertently settling right next to each other in MP as often happens in SP where you end up with capitals 4-5 tiles from each other. Maybe a compromise could be to give the settlers a sentry promotion or two?

If I don't see any more promising location nearby the optimal move is to settle on the 1E plains hill and ignore the wine (it's only a 2/1/3 tile improved anyway, on an off-path tech.) t1 plains hill + floodplain production is always useful and I can use it to expand quickly while researching towards Education; also an Elf settler can move into the forest for 1 movement point and settle without wasting a turn to do so.

[uberfish]

Moved north with the top scout, revealing another floodplain and some desert to the east... moved SE with the lower scout, finding a hut which I popped for a map. The map revealed icy wastes to the south, two dungeons, a barrow and the edge of the world. So, quite a lot of information, but no promising city sites.

Decided to migrate north towards more fertile lands, it's not just about the first city but about which direction I'm going to be able to find resources for future cities. The ice, tundra and desert makes the east look fairly unattractive for now. 1N or 1NE of the current settler location is an OK spot if I don't find anything next turn. Surely there must be some better resources or denser forests around though (I'm using the PBEM1 starts as my reference here, I'm not sure what map script this is but it's probably similar.) You can all laugh if I end up wandering for 10 turns and get eliminated by someone's scout or something.



Since their score increased, Malakim/Balseraphs settled on the first turn. Why Mahala has 0 points at this time is unclear.

[uberfish]

Oh, one more point in favour of moving, with there being some desert around there might be a chance of finding incense - floodplains + Plains Incense is one of the better starts in FFH and not uncommon to see, that would definitely be worth giving up 2 or 3 turns for. Incense is also of critical importance to a spiritual temple-building civ as it gives +1 happiness per temple.

[Dantski]

Could you turn resources on please? It can't be that you have 0 in that screenshot, that would be crazy.

As for the land, well the rivermouth seems to fork 2 ways to the west and there's always the possibility that those desert tiles to the east have some juicy floodplains nearby (can you bloom forests on floodplains later?).

I'd have liked to settle on that plains forest hill 1NW of the wheat myself. Food resources seem less common in FFH from personal experience and a plains hill capital + plenty of river is solid. You know the Doviello will likely rush someone and since you're close to the tundra/ice it could well be you.

Is your settler the one on the grass/river? My only problem with settling 1N or 1NE is there is a possible lack of production. Looks like it might be a floodplains 2W 1N of the settler which is nice.


Techwise it sort of depends on where you settle (also image is down on 1st page so don't recall what you start with),

[uberfish]

welcome Dantski!

Could you turn resources on please? It can't be that you have 0 in that screenshot, that would be crazy.

No new resources were revealed on turn 1 beyond the ones in the original screenshot (of course the south is ice and you wouldn't expect much there.) There must be some around though.

Terraforming-wise, you can't bloom on floodplains but you can vitalize the underlying desert to plains with nature III. The wheat I'm not in a hurry to connect, I'd rather have more floodplains now + hopefully some other special and take those resources later.

Maybe there's a nice surprise east of the wheat, I was all excited when I popped the map from the hut but of course it had to reveal all the ice instead... I bet no one has anywhere near as much difficulty figuring out what to do with their starting position

[NobleHelium]

Hello there. Not sure how much I'll be visiting, and I'm not really familiar with FFH, but this looks interesting.

One request: can you please use a different host for your images? Photobucket's bandwidth limitation is really quite ridiculous, images go down in a few days or a week tops. I recommend http://imageshack.us (you can choose to link to the thumbnail or the full image, and download the program to upload many images at once using a nonbrowser interface).